open source marketer and community manager

A new Pew study finds a gulf between the general population and Twitter users.

This report is interesting because they interviewed actual people. There is one fundamental statement in it but it’s not mentioning a fundamental piece of context.

The one interesting piece of data by Pew is that 10% of users create 80% of tweets, unsurprisingly. Twitter struggled for years on this and only when Dick Costolo came aboard I remember him saying this is a fact and designed the Twitter experience around it.

The most fundamental context worth adding is that Twitter audience is 9-15% made of bots and these bots are programmed to amplify those 10% top users. It’s worth repeating this fundamental fact every time social media channels are mentioned: robots are an important part of them, algorithms decide what’s published, when and what humans see at what time.

The strongest legacy of OpenStack Foundation is showing how to do open source at scale, with millions of dollar budget. Going well beyond the garages, the university labs, the funded startups and the small non-profits of the years before. OpenStack its practice on top of past experiences like the Apache way and the Ubuntu community habits. On top of those, the original teams at Rackspace and NASA built a solid fund-raising campaign, business development and marketing never seen before for an open source project.

At the core of all that effort stood four strong principles, today published in a book embedding the practice of open source. These are what makes OpenStack different and as of today, it’s the only place where open source projects get help with their open collaboration practice, beyond IP and events management.

OpenStack was started with the belief that a community of equals, working together in an open collaboration, would produce better software, more aligned to the needs of its users and more largely adopted. It was therefore started from day 0 as an open collaboration model that includes as many individuals and organizations as possible, on a level playing field, with everyone invited to design open infrastructure software.

Finally I took the time to clean up the Python code that publishes to images from the modified microwave toy to a WordPress site. I’m lying: the code is not clean at all but it serves its purpose… ship it!

In the process I learned a few things about WordPress REST API, Python and the Raspberry Pi. All fun. Python is basically the default language for Raspberry Pi. There are numerous modules to access all the hardware functions of the board and countless examples, tutorials, blog posts, wiki pages, meetups all about Python. The REST API Handbook is the main resource I used. Many tutorials online were written when the WP APIs were a separate plugin and they seem outdated. The handbook seems to be written with developers working within WordPress, with all examples provided in PHP and Javascript. I ended up writing a brief tutorial on how to create a post with images to WordPress using Python.

There are lots of photobooth applications targeting Raspberry Pis out there. I ended up forking drumminhands_photobooth which seemed polished enough. It’s originally designed to snap 4 pictures at the press of a button, blink a LED and show previews of the pictures on a screen, then create an animated GIF from the snapped poses and publish them to tumblr. Alternatively, publishes 4 independent JPEGs, based on a configuration option.

One cool thing about tumblr APIs is that they have a Python library dealing with authentication and the basic publishing operations. WordPress REST API don’t have anything like that (yet). Even authentication from a Python app requires an external plugin, which is not ideal.

The core of the photobooth app is the function publishing to WordPress:

Now every time someone pushes the Start button on the toy microwave, its light blinks and the screen shows instructions while snapping pictures and uploading them.

On the WordPress side, I picked Morphology Lite because of how the home page can be turned into a mosaic of images from the Featured image of the post. That’s it! I’ll update this post once I have enough images from an event.

After many experiments to increase engagement with brands on Twitter, I have collected enough evidence that Twitter is not worth much. From now on, the main focus of my social media marketing efforts will be other channels like Reddit, Hacker News, LinkedIn and other well targeted forums. My Twitter efforts are now down to the bottom of pile, down with Facebook (which doesn’t drive anything for the brands I’ve managed).

Massive increase in acquisition from social, most from Reddit and Hacker News

When I managed the launch of DreamHost DreamCompute, Twitter was a crucial part of the social media mix. We ran a small ad campaign on it with the objective to drive early signups to the cloud. Another ‘organic’ campaign revolved around DreamCompute’s nomination as finalist in OpenStack Superuser Awards, with hashtag #makecloudgreatagain and a micro-site cloning what looked like a joke towards a political campaign (in hindsight, not funny). The results of the Twitter campaign were impressive by Twitter standards: lots of retweets and comments, DreamHost account gained new followers. But from the business indicators, we got almost nothing: the high Twitter engagement drove little spurs of traffic to web properties and no conversions. I blamed the website for being poorly optimized for conversion and concluded that Twitter can be useful to drive traffic and that call to actions need to be optimized for mobile in order to get business results.

In my next experiment at DreamHost I played with Hacker News. After a couple of attempts, I lucked out and got a blog post on HN front page for a few hours: that drove traffic! Lots of traffic and a much better conversion rate than other sources. I learned that the results/effort ratio is so much higher for Hacker News but hitting the front page is obviously a hit-and-miss.

Fast-forward a couple of years, I started a new social media experiment mix for Zenko . The results are in and LinkedIn, Reddit and Hacker News are a much bigger generator of traffic to our website than Twitter. For example, posts on LinkedIn either from the official Scality account or personal profilestend to have a long shelf life, opposed to the very very short live of tweets. New posts on Hacker News and Reddit are usually short lived, few hours but they tend to drive an insane amount of traffic, even if they’re not voted up at all. Also visitors from Reddit and HN tend to bounce less and read more than one page. The few visitors from Twitter instead have a high bounce rate and rarely go beyond one page visit.

My experience with Zenko and DreamCompute tells me that Twitter shouldn’t be the first social media channel but rather LinkedIn, Reddit and Hacker News are more worth the time. Twitter is something you have to play with and may only be worth it for real-time interactions, like during events to drive traffic to a booth or a speaking session.

I trust Mozilla to do the right things… in general. I trust so much that I agree to share Firefox telemetry data to its server. I trust Mozilla to hold my traffic data, bookmarks etc with Sync. The thing is that I remember being informed of those options the first time I start Firefox on a new machine. Trusting Mozilla and Firefox is a choice I make, even if it’s the default one.

I didn’t like waking up and reading that Mozilla partnered with a TV show and silently installed an add-on on my computer. I don’t care what that add-on does: Mozilla sneaked it in on my computer. I don’t remember seeing any notification upon restarting Firefox, like “Hey, we partnered with XYZ Corp to collect anonymous data and do something great with it” or “Sorry, we just need to make money… It’s all good, we keep everything private as usual and no marketing bozos will bother you… Do you mind not changing the default and let this add-on run?”

Speaking of surprises, an old friend contacted me to let me know of an ongoing campaign to raise fundings to build a Power-based motherboard for a laptop. The association hopes to raise 12,000EUR to complete the design of the motherboard as phase I, and their website lists the ranges for the other milestones. It’s pretty cool that nowadays one can design a whole new system basically from scratch and with such little investments.

While reading the PowerPC Notebook website, I realized that Amiga also is still producing new PowerPC motherboards and Amiga OS runs on them. Quite incredible… Loved that machine.

A few weeks ago I found an old first-generation Raspberry Pi hiding in a closet. At the same time I started investigating WordPress REST API at work. I also wanted an excuse to buy a Dremel. Everything seemed to align when I was strolling by the local Goodwill where my wife found an old toy microwave. Perfect excuses assembled, I had to buy a Dremel to fit a Raspberry Pi, its camera and a screen in a toy microwave to build a photobooth machine.

Several nights after, the hardware is ready. I found a used Dremel on Craigslist: great machine to cut the plastic quickly. I carved an opening in the microwave’s front door and mounted the Landzo display on it. For holding the Pi in place, I used a very low tech hack of wood sticks and glue, plus a rubber band. Unfortunately the first-gen Pi doesn’t have mounting holes on its base and I didn’t want to spend more money on a case. Good enough.

The microwave came with buttons and a LED that I connected to the board’s GPIO: the Start button starts the photobooth app, and the LED blinks while taking pictures. There are 4 more buttons that I will probably connect too for something fun, like show a video of actual food being cooked in the microwave… something for version 2 though.

In the next post I’ll talk a little more about the Python code I modified to use WordPress REST API.

The display is sold as compatible with Raspberry Pi and probably it is but it didn’t work out of the box. The box comes with a CD-ROM but I don’t have any way to read that old stuff anymore. The landzo.com website doesn’t seem to host the content of that CD-ROM either.

The Pi doesn’t use the correct video modes for the display out of the box so I had to read the documentation. The gist of it is that you need to add a new custom mode to /boot/config.txt as below:

[…]when you use /me on the IRC gateway while in private chat with someone, Slack just drops the message on the floor and doesn’t deliver it!

The company brags about their IRC gateway to lure in more groups and teams, but Slack and IRC are two totally different beasts: there will always be an increasing amount of pieces that get lost in translation.

The Slack-IRC gateway is just a trick to lock more users into the walled garden. Resist!

Sometimes I like to sit down and play with technology. My colleague Mike Shroder mentioned VVV a few weeks ago and I had to try it. Check out this tutorial I wrote on how to create a new WordPress site, use Vagrant and git to develop a new theme locally, then push the modifications to a live site running on DreamHost (but it could run anywhere else, really).